Today I'm going to tell you guys about a game called Conan. Not to be confused with Age of Conan, just Conan, for the Playstation 3.
This article contains spoilers for my LP. If you're a viewer, I highly recommend skipping this or reading it after the LP is up.
Conan is published by THQ. Like virtually every game with the THQ tag, including Supreme Commander and Dawn of War 2, you can expect some degree of mediocrity, bugginess, rushedness, and overall subpar delivery. Like
most titles with the THQ logo, you can expect blizzard-level internery coupled with anguishing Western publishing practices, like Space Marine, which render the games not only not worth your money, but not even worth the effort of thinking about. Games so bad that they will render your semen sterile if you were to play them. It's best just not to think about them.
But those familiar with THQ know that behind that logo lays an even darker history, one of such foul and disgusting depths that even Blizzard's most recent vomit piles could be considered genuinely
good in comparison. THQ's legacy wasn't always that of a publisher - like EA, they began their story by shitting out rancid waste like Pit Fighter back on the early consoles. When the world became angry THQ became clever, taking up publishing to extend its unholy lifespan to ludicrous lengths. Starving companies like Relic of their once-beautiful lives, THQ has artificially expanded its fetid existence.
Yet, many developers wriggling under THQ's festering, vile sack of meat are undeserving of any pity. Even though Relic is a despicable company for all their laziness and ineptitude, some people still hold a shred of respect for them. Others are not so worthy of note.
A quick gander shows me that Conan has no rating on Gamespot, a site reknowned for publisher bias and paid-for-advertising. With a
single facebook like, it would appear that virtually no one has even heard of the game. Age of Conan, an entirely unrelated game, stole the name of the franchise's gaming presence for quite a time with failures of its own. But even Age of Conan still, at some distance, garnered a level of respect. Conan's presence in the online world is only that of confusion and disgust.
There appears to be a game called "Conan: The Dark Axe", which as far as I can tell is an unrelated ps2 title. I almost wished it was related - because this game's graphics don't even compete with a playstation 2 title like God of War 2. It would make sense if it was some kind of cheesy port. It isn't.
When I set foot into this game, with only a shred of previous experience, I did not expect to engage upon the epic journey that I did. By the end of my road I would come to wish the game was
only as poorly-created as Diablo 3. But Conan was not poorly created. It was a perfect creation. A creation designed to destroy me, wholly and utterly. An attack on my body and mind.
The premise of Conan is a simple one. God of War, butchered a bit, with a famed character of old novella and Arnold legacy. But, unlike Arnold, who pulled off a convincing Barbarian and formed some of my youth's cinema experiences, the voice of Conan in this game is a dull, dubbed washed-out intern of some nameless decree. One that stands out like a dull rod amongst a sea of writhing intern carcasses that comprise the namesake of the sole man whose job it was to voice act the
entire game's supply of male characters elsewhere.
Ah, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. The day is so young and our rage yet burns so hot. Calm yourself, tony. The rod is a patient creature, it likes to take its time writhing through your intestines.
A Thousand Shafts of Intern Jelly
Immediately upon starting Conan you are struck with how disgusting it looks, especially when you reach the ridiculously linear, corridory jungle zone past the prelude. The graphics of Conan do not even compare to titles nearly two generations old at the time of its release.
Above - God of War 2, a Playstation 2 title, in 720p (ps3 port).
Above - Conan, a native Playstation 3/360 title.
Not only are Conan's graphics the worst I've yet to see in the last 8 years except for Diablo 3, they are also incredibly buggy.
The anti-aliasing and alpha mapping are both victims of internery in this game, displaying colossal bugs across the board. Nearly every single character, and many objects, have this unusual outline on them, which ranges from distracting to blatantly fucking busted as shown above. The low-resolution textures remind me of Warcraft 3 at
best. The same enemy graphics are copy-pasted across the entire game. Particles, animations, everything feels like I've been trapped in some creepy time warp.
Anti-aliasing? That's just bill's gravity well, friend. Source - viewer screencap of LP.
Conan's graphics are a spectacular fail that would cost any normal company their future. At most, it docked THQ some of their less expensive CEO drink nights.
Source - Viewer screencap.
Conan uses Havok, a physics engine widely regarded as both inefficient and buggy. Its bugs are shown in full swing in conan, with everything from propelling the player character into the sky, to the more common ragdolls and objects getting stuck inside each other or geometry and break dancing. Whenever you die in Conan the game hangs for 1-3 seconds or longer as tony slowly turns the crank and shit sets on fire. Despite the low-resolution and non-detailed nature of the game it manages to perform like shit on a regular basis. Objects you interact with in the game even have the potential to kill you for no reason at all. THQ pride at work, here.
The bugs in conan's graphics begin to exceed predictable bounds when you pay attention to details I missed or didn't note during my intense gut-wrenching gameplay. Conan's hair is subject to many bugs in particular, very often freaking out.
With bugs often comes the nature of bugs - the lack of testing. And when developers don't test this is also usually an indicator of laziness. One echoed throughout the brush work in addition to the textures.
That's some mighty fine tiling you've got there! Source - viewer screencap of LP.
Clipping is abundant in top-selling titles like World of Warcraft and Starcraft 2 because no one could give less of a shit. Why would THQ miss the chance to educate Blizzard on how real companies handle clipping?
Backfacing. No, I'm not behind the worldspace. I'm just fighting a boss. The same boss everyone fights in the first hour of the game...
Blood decals are also hideously desynced or randomly vanish/reappear for no discernable reason, presumably an effect of the brain damage suffered when you begin to notice such things. There are physics objects that can vanish when you get near them, then re-appear when you step away. They still exist, they're just trapped in lardspace. The water deserves its own mention, as at one point in the LP I compare it to a "Horse sputtering dyed semen", a soupy, gooey, very much unlike water color substance that moves in an unusual and unearthly manner. While many companies struggle to create water, THQ's interns struggled to create horse juice.
Were we to take Conan's depiction of the Barbarian's world at heart, we are met with a depressing Gordian Knot of goatse holes in which the land is scribed of lardy paste, water is supplied by farm animals, and everything is trapped in its own sense of time and space. Bodies and objects are made out of either plastic or toughened grease, with no sense of weight or friction. A squid's only vulnerable point is a mast of a ship nowhere near it, and just about every evil doer has a hitman squad of ghetto-dwelling break dancers ready to wordlessly club your face in. One has to wonder if this is how THQ's interns see the world after being deprived of sunlight and protein, other than manmade protein, for 20 years.
One can sometimes ignore hideously disgusting graphics if the gameplay is extremely rewarding. Somehow, people do it for Starcraft 2 and Warcraft 3. But here, in Gameplay, conan spares zero quarter in the butchery of my sanity. In fact, the gameplay pushes the attack on my mind to exceeding depths of depravity few games have reached.
The gameplay is, as one would expect, a copy-paste of God of War, which pioneered the attributes for many western games to copy paste from. Conan has a few twists, however, such as pickupable weapons, a far shittier mana system, and reaction-based AI. The AI in this game is very dependent on your current actions, with pre-scripted actions for your every move. Thus, if the conditions are right, they'll always interrupt your slow attacks with their fast attacks, especially your high-tier finishers. This makes a large portion of weapons, and moves, very weak. Conan has environmental objects, some of which are critical to your success, like the Holy Bonfire of Godly Smiting, capable of decimating entire legions of enemies without you ever raising a finger.
Another big change from God of War is that every single combo in Conan has this very high random chance of having this arbitrary bullet time slowdown effect, be they Conan's or the enemy's combos. This effect doesn't do anything besides upset the flow of battle, fuck with your mental timings, and make the game incredibly agonizing to play. If you skip monsters like I did the game will just randomly slow down for no reason at all as they attack far away from you. Every time your block is broken the game slows down, though it offers you no opportunity to "respond", it's just entirely arbitrary.
Ah, but it doesn't end there! In addition to random slowdowns, you also get random camera shaking and zoom-ins! The most irritating thing you can possibly do with a camera is shake it. It's like THQ stole Michael Bay's handbook on how to disorient and piss off viewers.
Like God of War, however, Conan features ample amounts of redundant, cock-tearing button mashing. The most retarded, meaningless gimmick to ever make it into a game, the art of arbitrarily mashing buttons to prove your viking strength is one coveted heavily by mediocre western developers across the board. The presence of button hammering or QTE's in a game are a ready indicator of hideously shallow game design from the start, and Conan is no exception to this rule. Conan tried to break away from GoW in one respect by increasing the amount of buttons you need to hammer to open fucking doors.
Yet this is where the "innovation" ends and the bullshit starts. Conan is an extremely unresponsive game, often locking out directions on your control stick randomly, especially when rubbing against geometry. Enemies can chain off many attacks on you, permanently locking you into hit recovery and easily killing you on hard. Of course, every hit throws you into hit recovery, so you want to avoid being hit, or block, which you can't do in hit recovery or when attacking. Most enemies can break your block, though, while only specific moves that you get can break enemy block, usually risky ones, and only for specific weapons. Some monsters will warp you about the stage as you collide with their unpredictable and broken collision meshes. On one occasion the game simply crashed the ps3 when I used my spell to freeze two enemies and attacked them.
On the plus side, parrying is incredibly fucking broken in Conan, where sometimes you can parry and it results in the instant dismemberment of whatever it is that's attacking you. I have no idea if this is intentional or not, but it's extremely random and difficult to pull off.
Conan features an auto-locking mechanism - the stupidity of Alice's locking mechanism jumps to mind, but this one is entirely automatic and, as there's no ranged combat for you in Conan, it's for
melee. Yes. The melee combat locks onto enemies, seemingly randomly, but it's priority based. Viking: Battle for Asgard was like this, but it was much easier to fight than in Conan. In Conan, bosses have zero priority, and infinitely respawning trash have max priority. In one particular fight, the Squid, this renders an otherwise semi-reasonable fight impossibly ridiculous when combined with utterly broken pathing and collision.
That is to say, you're next to the boss, you're swinging at the boss, but the game decides to instead direct you to a Black Man some 20-30 feet behind you and attack him instead.
Individual trash opponents are rarely a problem on their own except for the spikey shield guys. Conan offers reasonable maneuverability and combat options outside of bugs. A lot of trash fights near the end of the game are hideously long and extremely difficult. But I got through it. It's the boss fights that make or break this game. As I discovered, breaking it was important. Even IGN recognized Conan as being a little more silly than competing titles, and Conan's last fight apparently won some kind of award for being ridiculously irritating. I seemed to have forgotten that when I started this LP. I doubt they did it on Hard like I did. Those casuals would never have made it far enough to try it on hard.
To really understand how bullshit a lot of these fights are you'd have to watch the LP. But it is clear that virtually none of them were ever tested, not even once. The most blatant, hideous of garbage flew right on by a multi-billion dollar company like slimfast drinks through an American's greasy fingers. To add bad onto worse, when you die you have to wait several seconds to accept the prompt to reload, which then takes an ungodly amount of time regardless of what it's reloading, like it's taking bits and pieces of the ps3's hard drive and sticking them all over the place for fun.
Reloading a boss fight often throws you into the path of an attack you must be ready to block immediately. This is the first "Gotcha!" you'll probably notice. Other "Gotcha!" moments include random, arbitrary geometry falling and throwing you to your death you have no way to react to, losing your health/mana pickups instantly if you get touched accessing them, elements that only become active when certain elements are killed, and bad fixed cameras.
Instant death mechanics are profoundly abundant in many of the boss fights. Not necessarily one-hit kills, but rather the series of mechanics clashing into each other like a wall of burly, naked men charging full-burn into each other with horse-splitting erections, and you standing in the dead center of ground zero. In several fights, taking a single hit can mean being totally unable to do anything for several seconds or longer, eating area of effect damage or environmental damage that generally guarantees your death.
Not all of the boss fights in Conan are beyond hope. Bone Cleaver's two encounters, particularly the second one, are difficult but manageable once you understand how he works and how his AI works (this can take an hour or so). The Sand Dragon's last phase is extremely twitchy, but it was the non-fighting jumping aspect that irritated me the most. The Sorceress Queen had far too much health, and her second laser phase was total bullshit, but I got by. The problem was they were vastly improperly tuned, and execution came down to extremely twitchy, time-consuming repetitive motions, especially for the Sorceress Queen, whose many phases were lengthy and anguishingly slow to make progress in, a process not made any more pleasant by her horribly unbalanced audio.
Some fights, though, presented a series of ideas and then puked all over your face when you thought you were ready to do something about it. The Squid comes to mind as the most immediate boss who truly splits your anus open wide. Coil flippy at the best, utterly hideous at worst, the Squid's last phase pits you against incredibly broken collision, the most annoying infinite respawning adds in the entire game (that you later face very regularly), multiple instant-death possibilities, and countless environmental hazards. For a boss who has the least health of any other in the game, the Squid would take the most out of me up to that point.
The squid's bugs and brokenness cannot easily be summarized. Any and all thrown attacks prioritize the ship's mast, nowhere near the squid. Yet, somehow, there's a 50% chance this will
actually do damage to him. If there's a single Black Man active, however, he steals all melee and ranged priority. The boss' melee attack will either do 1/4 your health or your entire health when it hits you, with his ranged attack being similarily unpredictable. Nearly unavoidable tentacles punish you for lingering on either sides of the arenas, while Black Men are liable to stunlock you or push you out of the one area in the center safe from his breath AoE. The weapon racks are extremely unresponsive to pick up any spears from, so expending their contents for ranged attacks is not viable by any means. Did I mention the Black Men the squid spawns are immune to all of his damage? Yep. It gets better.
The Squid's damage collision is like the shape of an L, if you aren't in a very specific location when his sweeping breath ends, you will at best lose your chance to do a lot of damage, and at worst take a massive chunk of damage when his animation finishes for no discernable reason. Additionally, being near him when he attacks may randomly teleport you in strange locations across the stage for no reason at all, presumably due to broken physics detection. Alternatively you may begin bouncing across the top of his head wildly, unable to attack or do much of anything in the precious few seconds you have to do anything to him.
The only part of the squid that is actually in this dimension and thus can receive damage, other than the ship's mast with thrown weapons, is his beak. So his huge body is basically nothing but a death trap. Meanwhile, the adds he spawns are amongst the few that give you no health or mana. Speaking of which, mana is useless in a boss fight since bosses take massively reduced damage from any damage spells you have AND you only have enough mana for one damaging spell anyways. At the very most a spell might offer you relief from Black Men if you channel it right before the boss becomes vulnerable. But most often you can't even cast one anyways. This is assuming that, when you cast a spell, it actually works - I've casted spells and no damage elements spawned. Awesome.
At the end of the game you get a Goatse spell, which seems useful as it can eat a lot of Snow Arabs. But when you reach the really annoying trash in the final zone you'll find they nerfed the fuck out of Goatse, which uses your entire mana pool to kill 3 small enemies or a single statue. Great work, Blizzard.
For Conan, spending only an hour on the same exact phase of a boss fight was considered a triumph by the end of it. Graven took me over two hours, and 108 deaths, to finally kill. It wasn't so much as fighting a boss as it was being in the right place at the right time and having set up the positioning of the adds to let you turn the lard crank in peace. The personal battle phases were the easiest parts of Graven, merely requiring near-perfect execution and reflexes. But the spinning tentacle phases were much worse.
If you're seeing this in motion and not watching a video I feel sorry for your anus.
This game has a rage mechanic not unlike Rage of the Titans and such in God of War, with the exception that only very specific moves in the game generate useful quantities of it, so you never see it unless you use those moves. Several fights seem geared to abusing it, since it feeds you with insane amounts of health, mana, and experience orbs when you start getting it maxed out. Hits from enemies also reduce it, along with time, so it's easy to lose once you've got it. In boss fights it's null, since you don't get to ever have any rage at all. When you get it rolling it's quite useful, though!
The game's savepoints for the most part are better than a lot of the ARPG's, however. Some of them even put you midway through a boss fight, so you don't need to repeat the entire thing. That's nice. On the other hand, savepoints for falling and dying are different, sometimes putting you at strange areas. Other times, the game forces you through arbitrary movements a la Alice: Madness Returns when you die, resulting in much rage.
The voice work and sound effects in this game are nothing short of Blizzard-level bad. In fact, this would be one of the few games whose audio work in recent days I consider worse than Blizzard. You see, Blizzard, like every other developer, relies extremely heavily on commercial cds, so the audio work can only be as bad as the commercial cds + bad editing. But the audio work on conan seems to be largely hand-made by a single intern.
The first thing that tells you something is amiss is the incredibly unbalanced music audio when the game starts. Music, music cues, and event-based music are all incredibly broken in this game, leading to random and lengthy bouts of no music, calm music, or overly loud combat music. The music itself isn't necessarily bad, if not overly repetitive and lacking in instrumental variety. A C movie level of music I guess. Some is decent, most is boring.
The second thing that crawls up your rectum is the insanely low quality encode on the narrator's voice. You can hear static, buzzing, and frequency crunching you'd likely not have heard since 240p youtube or cassette tapes. The quality is so fucking awful I wonder if they were using some cheap radioshack headset for their audio work and couldn't actually tell it was the worst thing to ever be released on digital media. This is a fucking Bluray, not a floppy disk. Use something other than 4k hz 16kbps. This makes her voice not only painful to behold, but also very distorted. All of the sound work in the game follows suite in this never-ending shower of sharpened dicks.
The third thing that tells you something's wrong is the impact sound used for every. Single. Weapon. I compare it to a wet penis being struck across your face. Every weapon makes this sound, with some attacks/slows deepening the pitch so the already low-quality ugliness is elongated. There a few sounds that are further from what you'd expect out of hitting someone with a huge two-handed sword.
The voice acting and sfx are all-around Sc2 zerg-level uninspired and boring. The game sounds like a poorly dubbed chinese kung fu movie, except all voiced by the same guy. Conan's voice is unemotional and detached, which you are continually reminded by with his 5 combat lines he repeats throughout every fight in the game. Nothing about the audio work engages you in any form, except for the stupidly repetitive combat music that wildly cuts on and off whenever you are moving around. This is not made any better by the fact that the music changes from a unique track to a generic one when you reload on some fights (e.g. graven).
Although you pick up different weapons and shit throughout the game this ends up concluding as a gimmick at best. The weapon models change but they all seem to have the exact same attributes, animations, damage and anything that might have actually given this system a fighting chance in an environment competing with Heavenly Sword and God of War 3. This leaves Conan with a broken, unbalanced combat system, reinforced with graphics two generations behind and audio amongst the worst in the decade.
In a way, my experience with Conan echoes a lot of things in Viking. But Viking had a few redeeming qualities, seemingly more like lost potential than a true to heart failure all around. Conan offers nothing when you finish it except a desire to put a bullet in your own head.
Nihilistic, Paradox, and THQ. These are company names I will forever regard with disgust and hatred.
basically kinda like heros of might and magic 4 + risk.
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